maandag 23 juli 2012

Het ondermijnen van het ouderlijk gezag - English article

We
have nationalised child-raising’, claimed Shaun Bailey, head of the charity My
Generation, during an autopsy of the riots and looting that swept England in
summer 2011. Bailey continued: ‘People think that the government is responsible
for their children - that weakens the family structure. One of the worst
things as a parent is having nothing to teach your children; one of the worst
things as a child is to believe that authority lies outside your parents.’ (1)

Now,
I am spontaneously prone to questioning the pronouncements of Big Society
worthies such as Shaun Bailey. I have no idea what My Generation actually is;
according to the Charity Commission
records, it
has now ‘ceased to exist’. And it was striking that, having denounced the
‘nationalisation’ of parenting by the state, Bailey’s proposed solutions seemed
to involve yet more of the same: for example, that school pupils should be
taught about ‘parenting’ from an even earlier age.

But Bailey’s diagnosis of the
dangers inherent in eroding parental authority was absolutely spot on. By
attempting to ‘nationalise’ childrearing, whether by providing classes to
instruct parents in officially approved childrearing methods or by using
schools to inculcate children in a heightened awareness of the failings of
their mothers and fathers, in recent decades, government parenting policy has
stripped parents of their directly authoritative role.

Instead of being the boss of
their own homes, parents are situated as mediators in the relationship between
the child and the state, and told that their primary responsibility is not to
do right by their child but to show that they are doing the right thing
according to the current parenting orthodoxy. The effect of this, as Bailey
suggested last year, is to disorient both parents and children, as both
question the basis for parental authority.

Was this what caused the riots
last summer? Not on its own. The behaviour of those young people engaged in the
mayhem was profoundly shocking - but so, too, was the response of the adult
population, from the middle classes cowering in their living rooms and boasting
about that in the press, to the failure of the police to intervene decisively. What
underpinned the chaos was the open collapse of adult authority, and this should
have provided a wake-up call to our society about the need to grow up and take
responsibility for the younger generations.

But the problem of parental
authority forms an important part of the generalised crisis of adulthood, and
it is worth reflecting on the relationship between the two.

Nationalised
parenting and the problem of discipline

My
book Standing Up To Supernanny is largely a critique of ‘parent bashing’,
where parents are held singlehandedly responsible for everything that might go
wrong with their kids, from a decayed tooth to teenage angst, to failure to
achieve top grades in their numerous (and increasingly, apparently meaningless)
school exams.

The widespread acceptance of
parental determinism is one of the most limited and cowardly ideas of our time.
It seeks to find a simplistic personal cause to every social problem, and has
the effect of absolving society at large from doing anything other than nagging
parents about how to behave (see: Parental determinism: a most harmful
prejudice, by
Frank Furedi).

For all the reasons that
officials like to bash parents, it was not surprising to see this technique
emerge as part of the response to last summer’s riots - for example, in prime
minister David Cameron’s opportunistic scapegoating of 120,000 ‘troubled’
families as the cause of the modern malaise. But what was, if anything, worse
than the parent-bashing was the outpouring of fatalism that situated ‘poor
parenting’ within a comprehensive list of the ills of the modern age.

On 14 August 2011, for
example, the Independentclaimed that the riots were the
product of ‘a perfect storm of school holidays, rising living costs, warm
weather, cautious police tactics, rolling TV news and social media, [alongside]
deep-seated social and cultural problems, including poverty, failing schools,
gangs, joblessness, materialism and poor parenting’.

In some sections of the press,
this generalised sense of angst quickly morphed into the idea that the riots
were merely an understandable - even tacitly condonable - reaction to the naff
consumerism of modern life, economic problems, the behaviour of bankers, and
anything else that the liberal intelligentsia might not like about
twenty-first-century Britain (including the weather). As such, the more
interesting critiques of the problem of contemporary parenting culture were
deftly sidelined when they could have been directly addressed and debated.

For example, parent-bashing
tends to assume that parents don’t care enough about their kids. Yet evidence
of recent decades suggests that, whether they live in leafy Surrey or
inner-city Tottenham, parents are putting more time, energy and anxiety into
trying to do right by their kids than any previous generation. The problem is that they
increasingly seem to lack the authority to mould their kids into an image of
responsible adulthood; meaning that when 18-year-olds start having toddler
tantrums and trashing their own neighbourhoods, nobody knows quite what to do.

The problem of parental
authority in the immediate aftermath of the riots was most clearly expressed in
parents’ complaints about how they felt disempowered in their ability to
discipline their children. Having been told by social services and other
official agencies that the only permissible forms of discipline were those
associated with ‘positive parenting’ - in other words, praise and persuasion,
which are not forms of discipline at all - they felt helpless to control their
kids when their behaviour started to get out of control.

Some, including London mayor
Boris Johnson and the Labour MP for Tottenham, David Lammy, have engaged with
this problem, and made some welcome arguments as to why restrictions on
parents’ disciplinary methods have gone too far and why parents should be able
to smack their children when necessary. However, the recognition of the need
for parental discipline needs to be underpinned by a broader sense that it is
adults who make the rules, and that it is right for them to impose sanctions
when things go wrong.

For parents to exercise
authority, there has to be a presumption of parental authority. This
presumption has been in decline for some time, but it is now becoming clear
just how comprehensively it has been eroded by two decades of ‘nationalised’
parenting policy.

The
slow demise of adult authority

The
anxiety about out-of-control youth is not new. Historians have noted a particular
peak in this anxiety in the immediate postwar period, when anxieties about the
emergence of the ‘teenager’ developed as a particular law-and-order problem in
the form of ‘juvenile delinquency’. John R Gillis’s 1974 book, Youth and
History, describes the concerns like this:

‘The notion of a period of
life freed from the responsibilities of adulthood was too easily distorted by
the more restive members of the younger generation into the frightening image
of the rebel without a cause.

And if rising rates of
delinquency were not enough to give second thoughts, there was also the
realisation that even the more benign features of adolescence, including its
political passivity and social conformity, mirrored other well-known weaknesses
of adult society.’ (2)

Alongside anxieties about
delinquent youth, there were also concerns about the decline of the
authoritative adult, and the consequences of this for failing to contain
problems. For example, John Barron Mays wrote, in his 1961 article about
‘Teenage Culture in Contemporary Britain and Europe’: ‘The majority of those
who rebel in this period would, given adequate support and firm but sympathetic
leadership, adjust to their growing-up problems in socially acceptable ways.
But the failure of older members of the community, especially of parents and
educators, to give them adequate support, makes them temporarily easy victims
for the illegal promptings of a handful of seriously maladjusted and
emotionally disturbed instigators.’ (3)

Even though, in the 1950s,
there was a fear that adults weren’t quite up to the job of keeping all the
young people in check, there remained a sense that the ‘rebels without a cause’
were a minority who could, and should, be brought under control. Despite the
often bleak view of adult society at that time, there was still a clearly
understood distinction between adults and children, and a view that adult
society needed to sort its own problems out, rather than indulge the
lashing-out of its youth.By the time Christopher Lasch
wrote his bleakly prescient 1977 book Haven in a Heartless World: The Family
Besieged, the decline of authority within the adult community at large was
both mirrored and exacerbated by the erosion of parental authority within the
family. Part of this problem, according to Lasch, was the extent to which
agencies and cultural influences external to the family were taking on
increasing aspects of the socialisation process.

In consequence, argued Lasch:
‘Relations within the family have come to resemble relations in the rest of
society. Parents refrain from arbitrarily imposing their wishes on the child,
thereby making it clear that authority deserves to be recognised as valid only
insofar as it conforms to reason.’ This resulted in a ‘growing gap between
discipline and affection’ in the American family at that time, where discipline
was outsourced. (4)

Lasch’s argument about the
distinctiveness of parental authority from that imposed by other agencies is
important to address. For Lasch, it is problematic when the authority of mum
and dad appears just like the authority of a teacher, a politician or a boss,
in that it has to be earned, and that it can and should be questioned. That is
because relations within the family are different from relations within the
rest of society. Family relations are implicit, affective, emotional, physical;
parental authority is all-encompassing in a way that official diktat never can
be.

That is why the phrases ‘I’ll
tell your mum’ or ‘wait ’til your father gets home’ have historically had far
greater import with children than being given detention at school or told off
by a policeman for throwing stones at derelict buildings. Today, though, the
phrase ‘you’re not the boss of me’ is as likely to be used in backchat to a
mother or father as it is to a teacher. Adult authority has become so
diminished that, culturally, no source of authority is assumed to carry weight
over younger generations.

Why
authoritarianism is no substitute for authority

One
consequence of the undermining of parental authority, according to Lasch, is
authoritarianism: ‘Law enforcement comes to be seen as the only effective
deterrent in a society that no longer knows the difference between right and
wrong.’ In contemporary Britain, one clear consequence of the undermining of
tacit forms of authority - that of parents, primarily, but also that of adults
within the community - has been that the only people who are ‘allowed’ to
exercise discipline over children are those who have been specifically charged
by the state with this task, and trained accordingly.

So teachers, probation
officers, social workers and community co-optees who have undergone Criminal
Records Bureau checks and attended certain training courses are presented with
a badge of authority, which is supposed to signal that they are to be trusted
and that they should be obeyed. Anyone who falls outside the sphere of official
regulation - parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, neighbours, family
friends, residents of a community - is warned, by a combination of cultural
norms and the direct threat of sanction, to hold back.

This has important
consequences for the sense of adult authority in general. If parents feel
nervous about smacking, or shouting at, their own children, they feel 10 times
more nervous about imposing their authority upon other people’s children. In
this situation, the need for control over youth is either batted back to the
parents, whose ability to do it is constrained by the orthodoxy of ‘positive
parenting’, or it is handed over to the authorities, who, it turns out, cannot
do the job either.This latter point was starkly
revealed during last summer’s riots, with the collapse of the police. In August
2011, Omar Malik, whose flat was caught up in what The Sunday Times
describes as the ‘moral blaze’, called the police twice and the fire brigade
three times, in vain. ‘We felt completely abandoned in our hour of need’, he
said. When he asked his five-year-old son to draw a picture of the fire, as
‘therapy’, he recalled that, ‘the child drew his burning home with firefighters
pointing their hoses in the wrong direction, while police stood by doing
nothing’ (4).

The failure experienced by
Malik’s family, and indeed by the communities affected by the riots, was not
simply the police being too inept to do their job. It was a sense that all
adult authority had suddenly disappeared. And if society loses that fundamental
sense that the adults are in charge, then you can arm a body of men as much as
you like but it won’t be able to contain the problem.

The British police force
currently has a number of institutional problems, all of which contribute to
its often apparent inability to act effectively; but its paralysis in the face
of young people is intrinsically related to the wider anxiety about who is the
boss in the adult-child relationship. Police officers, like teachers, social
workers and others, are trained according to the idea that young people are
supposed to be listened to, negotiated with, flattered and cajoled, but never
criticised or forced to behave. So when they don’t behave, all hell breaks
loose.

In this regard, the crisis of
adult authority today goes far deeper than that described by Christopher Lasch
in 1977. He warned that its absence would lead to law enforcement being seen as
the ‘only effective deterrent’ to wrongdoing - in fact, when the distinction
between right and wrong really does become lost, transgressors do not even
consider the possibility that they might be held to account for breaking the
law.

This was perhaps best summed
up by the much-reported story of the female looter who was caught on a shop’s
CCTV camera trying on shoes before she stole them: the surprise was less that
she stole the shoes than that she never considered that she would be held to
account for doing so. It was previously revealed in the arrogance of some of
the students protesting against the education cuts, who did not bother to
conceal their identities when causing damage, and were surprised when the cops
come knocking at their door.

It should be stressed that the
upshot of the police lacking authority over young people is not that we will
have a kinder, more humane society. Rather, the inability to act in an
authoritative way merely leads the police force to seek blunter technical means
of enforcing social control - as with the bizarre discussion about the need to
use water cannons and other violent tools in the face of any future riots.

Within the family as well, the
erosion of adult authority does not mean that children enjoy more freedom of
expression, or that they are raised to become happier beings. As Shaun
Bailey said: ‘One of the worst things as a child is to believe that authority
lies outside your parents.’ If there is one positive lesson that we can
learn from last summer’s riots, it is that the nationalisation of parenting
makes everything worse, and that reclaiming our kids would indeed make the
world a better place.Jennie Bristow is editor of Abortion Review and author of Standing Up
To Supernanny and co-author of Licensed to Hug. (Buy these books from Amazon (UK) here and here.)